Cartogra.com is a photo sharing web site that offers various services to clients. Digital images can be organized in albums by topic or event, and shared with friends and family. Digital images can be incorporated in post cards and greeting cards, and they can be posted to online auction sites, ads, and home pages. Personal photos can be combined with colorful animated frames and music to create multimedia slide shows. Clients can select digital images and choose the size and number of copies, and service providers can make photo-quality prints from the digital images.
The digital images and the photo sharing web sites are stored on servers. A client uploads digital images to a server, and the server formats the images on the fly for a main catalog page. Other clients can then access the images via a network such as the Internet.
The clients may be personal computers. However, one advantage of the photo sharing web sites is that they allow photo sharing, organizing, and viewing activities by clients other than personal computers. Other types of clients include digital cameras, scanners, game consoles, set-tops, PDAs, and other photo-ready, Internet-ready devices.
On-line image editing tools enable clients to edit and enhance their digital images with features such as auto fix, zoom, red-eye removal, crop, rotate, brightness, and contrast prior to sharing or printing.
On a personal computer, on-line editing can be easier to perform than downloading an image from a web site, running a standalone image editing program, using the standalone program to edit the image, and then uploading the edited image back to the web site. Moreover, standalone image editing programs tend to have complex interfaces.
With certain other clients, on-line editing is the only way to edit digital images. A client such as a “WebTV” interface usually does not have sufficient memory to store a standalone image editing program.
Some services take silver halide film, generate digital images from the silver halide film, and post high resolution digital images directly to web sites. If customers are not allowed to modify the high resolution images, on-line editing affords the only way of making changes to the high resolution images.